


Cities Beneath Cities

by deathwailart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Caves, Constellations, Fantasy, Forgotten Cities, Gen, Stars in Jars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-30
Updated: 2011-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-24 05:01:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are cities beneath cities, beneath the sprawling masses of crowded, teeming buidlings filled with the hustle and bustle of people going about their business under the watchful eyes of the holy buildings, great spires rising high into the skies, some high enough that they seemingly pierce the heavens and on bad day are obscured by thick bands of cloud and fog and low lying mist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cities Beneath Cities

**Author's Note:**

> Araceli - Altar of the Sky (ah-rah-THE-lee) (Spanish)  
> Sombra - Shadow (Spanish)  
> Mason - Stone  
> Luscinia - Nightingale (Latin)  
> Lux - Light (Latin)
> 
> Written for a picture prompt: http://i51.tinypic.com/jsodcn.jpg

There are cities beneath cities, beneath the sprawling masses of crowded, teeming buildings filled with the hustle and bustle of people going about their business under the watchful eyes of the holy buildings, great spires rising high into the skies, some high enough that they seemingly pierce the heavens and on bad day are obscured by thick bands of cloud and fog and low lying mist. But beneath the city there is the subterranean city but it is a city in name only, dank and dark, fetid, the home of ghosts and wraiths and shadows. That is what they are taught from as soon as they are old enough to understand words. Condemned to be forgotten as it crumbles and gives way, vicious beasts on the prowl. Only the foolhardy would venture there and many are lost or feared dead from some savage monster or a fall perhaps, plummeting down in a dark so deep that no light could ever hope to penetrate it. And endless fall, the holy men say, damned by their own stupidity.

But it is beneath the holy buildings that the passages to the underground city lies and the doors to the passages are in plain sight. A test of faith. The weak and the wicked give in to temptation, lead astray and the rest of their flock follow until only the strong remain, the good. For the great city is built to be a shining beacon, to be a bright jewel, to represent the people who dwell above.

Not all who venture through the unlocked doors are wicked. So many are curious. They want to know the mysteries of the underground city with their own sense which to them is no great sin but to most, to the flocks, the great vast flocks of people who follow the holy men, that they never come back is proof sure enough that the doors might as well be the gates of hell. And they give thanks to their saviours and protectors, counting themselves lucky that nothing has ever ventured from the other side of the door to raise hell among them.

The people do not know that the doors open one way only. That once you are on the other side - the wrong side - you are condemned to your fate.

And yet, that is not all there is. The underground city is not wholly a dark waste and against the gloom pad a girl and her wolf, seemingly made not from flesh but rather light, golden and near blinding, casting a wide bright glow to light their way as they traverse the labyrinthine maze of darkness and disrepair, winding their way through passageways with purpose. For they are the denizens. They are the ones who have come to call this home and the girl and her wolf are not alone but they have come to greet newcomers, holding their glass jars of unnatural light with them. Light captured from the sky so long ago before the holy men came to their homes to convert them, calling them heathen, heretic. They burned their gathering halls and tents and caravans, cut down their great forests, poisoned the rivers, herded a nomadic people into buildings. And when the captives would not listen to their captors they drove them underground as a slight. Into the basements of the holy buildings as the world above become unrecognisable, separated from a sky they had once worshipped and used as witness to all things. They plucked the light of the stars before being locked away, to leave the world above dark save for moon and sun and by this light they chipped away at their prisons to build a new city.

Thought dead. All of them. The arrogance of the conquerors who believed those below had died, had wept and weakened cut off from all they knew and they became drunk and gluttonous. They had been proved right, they proclaimed loudly to their people who bowed before them. All the while the dark beneath the streets began to change, carved out by starlight held in glass by a people forgotten now as the stuff of myths.

It isn't every day that there is someone new in the city but the wolf raises his head and howls, scrabbling at her as she gets up, lifting the thick black cloth from her glass jar. The sudden brightness startles none of them - they have adapted and always look to the day when they will be able to return to the world above, to see what has happened, to reclaim it but they are not so foolish as to try yet. There is no way to open any of those doors - generations before smashed themselves against it, hoping to make the thick stone bulge but they were cut off as ever with only bruises, broken bones and even more broken spirits to show for their efforts. Araceli smiles at Sombra, her great wolf who is so dark that he melts into shadows like a spirit and there are many, new arrivals, who mistake him as some ominous tiding. Sombra is no such thing. Stalwart protector but he sleeps by her side, thick fur warm and begs for scraps, licking her palms and cheek. She affixes his collar with the glowing jar, the silver bells so that she does not lose track of him and pulls her jacket tight about herself, bare feet on the stone as she sets off. Sombra lopes ahead, casting odd shadows and the bells trill as she follows sedately and wonders what she will deal with today. Often tears, fear, denials. They plead with her not to cut their throats, beg mercies with saliva and snot staining their faces as she watches solemnly.

Sombra picks up the scent and runs. He is like her, born to darkness and her people say that they have the stars in their eyes, all of the constellations there for those who know how to look and so many of them have been named for the sky, for the stars, the moon, the sun. She named her wolf for their home though because light and day both belong to the sky but she understands why her elders will cling so doggedly to the old ways. Only she does not but she voices that only to her shadow, her head in the coarse fur of his neck and she knows that he listens, that he understands because she understands his eyes, his growls, his movements. Their minds are open to one another in a language that has no words and that she could not hope to explain to a single soul from either city.

When she reaches the roughly hewn stone steps she stops by Sombra, strokes down the back of the wolf and touches fingers to the glistening spots on the floor so that they come away wet with blood that is licked away. He whines and she smiles, pats him and gestures for them to continue to where a young man sits huddled. She hopes he's unhurt - it's a struggle to try to aid someone who recoils from her touch as though she is a demon. And leaving them to find another to help results in souls who lose themselves, unused to navigating and with no light of their own for Sombra will not part from her side, not since he came upon her as a child splashing and spluttering in an underground lake and hauled her out again. Ever since he has walked by her side. The Altar of the Sky and the Shadow she casts.

She reaches the newcomer, a boy maybe her age and she shields her light as much as she can when he squints. He's been here long enough for his eyes to adjust but that doesn't tell her overly much – eyes adjust faster than hearts and minds and he is likely to see only the silver edges of her, a shape that reaches out and speaks with a girl's voice intent to deceive. She hopes he does not throw himself from a ledge because she has seen that and lowered her jar enough to see the splattered remains, Sombra howling at her side in sorrow. It is always sad to lose a soul over a misunderstanding. He curls his legs to his chest when she stops and crouches, Sombra sniffing the air and panting because the wolf is always anxious around a stranger at first, something she does not fault him for as she can feel her palms becoming slick with sweat as she smiles as gently as she can.

"Welcome to the City Beneath Cities," she intones, "I am Araceli," below them, Sombra grumbles and she laughs, waving him forward so he can nose at her palm, bells jingling, jar swinging to cast shadows, "this is Sombra."  
  
"Ma-mason," the stranger, the newcomer, Mason, replies and he looks between her and the door that will not budge for him and when she takes another step closer she can see that he is one who has scrabbled, feeling for some indication that there is a gap, that with a lever or sheer force of will that he will open the door to throw himself at the feet of the holy men to beg mercy.  
  
"Once you come to the City, you remain in the City." It gives her no joy to say such things, to snuff out hope but at the same time it is cruel to let that hope kindle down here. Mason sighs, a shuddery shaking thing but he gets to his feet, nods to her and holds out his palm for Sombra who approaches and sniffs, licking at dried blood. He flinches but it is better than others have fared and she nods to him, bids him come and Sombra trots ahead of them to light their way.

"The City Beneath Cities," he says quietly, once they are down the stairs, along the narrow walkway and onto the wide stone that has a thick wall to one side and a seemingly bottomless cavern to the other and she steers him so he is to the wall. She does not trust the curious where it is concerned and even some of her people have been thrown down to die, their glasses shattering, the starlight rising and shooting to find a new home. So much madness and none of it there. Accusations of the holy men yet it is their people who sow it here, the people they will not miss. People they will say brought this fate on – she has heard of the sermons of the holy men from many sources, listening from her bed as a child and then as part of the circles when she came of age. "You call it the same thing we do."  
  
"We call it what it is, they call it what it is. But we do not call your world heaven or hell; it is simply the upper city."  
  
"What are you?"

She stops, Sombra sits and watches and she wonders if it unnerves him the way it unnerves so many others, even her own people.

"I am a girl, I am Araceli, I am flesh and blood, I am muscle and blood, organs and tissues and membranes, veins and arteries," she holds the star jar to her arm – she is so pale compared to him, a ghost, a phantom, an eerie thing in the darkness and her veins are so blue and easily seen when she raises the light to shine through her skin – so that he might see, "I have hair," she twirls it around her finger, copper glinting through auburn, "I have eyes and nose and mouth," she holds the jar beneath her chin and grins a gargoyle grin. It is what they did as children and what people in the City Above do too, she knows that. A laugh startles out of him and Sombra lets out a noise close to a bark at it. He smiles and nods.  
  
"So human."  
  
"Human."  
  
"Where are we going?"  
  
"It doesn't have a name, we don't name anything down here beyond the doors and the caverns, it is simply the meeting place where you will meet the elders and be given what you need."  
  
"Then how do you find anything?"  
  
She takes his hand (so warm, warmer than them, used to the cold) and places it flat to the wall as she speaks, "These guide us, we learn the letters and know where it is that we go and Sombra will always follow his nose."  
  
"What will happen to me?"  
  
"I already told you. There is not a way out. I already told you that too. You will speak to the elders who will explain all of this and then you will live here in the city or you will die trying to leave, perhaps lost and starving, perhaps of despair, perhaps from a fall, intentional or not."  
  
"The elders?"  
  
"I am not to explain it; I am merely to guide you."

And so she does.

The elders are the eldest of them, those who live when old age claims others, the ones who name them. They are not holy men but she is sure that is how the newcomers must think of them even if they preach not of gods but of mother sky and stars and roaming the lands. They were the first to be brought, men and woman, bleached from being separated from their sky and imprisoned in the dark and they speak in whispers as though raising their voices pains them. They blaze star fire in a great glass pot of hundreds of different hues and it casts a rainbow about them as they tell their tales of who they are, what was done to them, how they will one day reclaim the City Above but not for the city. They will coax forests, they will heal the waters and they will wander barefoot across all the lands even if she cannot imagine them moving more than they do now – they are frail, frailer than the shifting insects and fleeting birds that grow. If a limb was grabbed it would break quicker than a slender blade of milkgrass at the end of the season by the rivers. She listens as allows to the tales, shifting rainbow hues painting white faces, chalky and wrinkled, loose skin that clings to bones in places and hangs in others and they are the only ghosts as they tell their stories to Mason who nods until finally he is given into Araceli's charge once more. She must rouse Sombra, the wolf asleep with his great rumbling snore that makes her skin buzz and her teeth rattle when she rests her head against him.

Mason is white when they are done and she presses a hand to the small of his back to take him to where she lives beneath her tent, the shifting shelter not needed but all they have of their old ways, that and the stars and the constellations writ in their eyes. There is always extra and she gives him a bedroll and tells him to sleep for now.

"How can I sleep knowing what I do?" He asks it of her plaintively. Sombra cuffs him with a paw and he laughs again. She frowns and covers her star jar, removes Sombra's collar and covers that too; the wolf settles himself down to scratch and nibble at himself as she studies Mason with suspicious eyes.  
  
"You smile too much, you laugh too much," she tells him plainly, changing from one set of clothes to the other and he shrugs his shoulders as if that explains the matter which makes her growl in her throat and fix him with a look, leaning close in the dark so that he can see the stars in her eyes. "Why do you not weep and wail and beg and plead as all the others? Or are you a madman?"  
  
"I am not mad," he sits with his legs crossed, facing her and he looks earnest but she has spent her whole life down her and not once has she encountered this reaction in her time as guide. "It can't be so bad if you have all survived and lived for so long."  
  
"You will not always say that," she vows in a low tone.

Mason laughs. She huffs, whistles for Sombra and the wolf lies between them both. But Mason does not sleep even though he should be exhausted and she rolls onto her back from her side, a little bottle in hand.

"Do you want dream milk to sleep?" She asks.  
  
"Will I dream?"  
  
"It is named dream milk."  
  
He holds out his hand for it and pulls the stopper from the bottle, swallows it back in one long swig and hands her the empty bottle as he stretches out, others filing in. There is no true night or day, morning or noon or evening and they sleep in shifts when they tire. No one asks about the stranger in their midst. She wonders what Mason dreams of as she lies awake and restless, kicking and twisting until Sombra gives her a nip as warning – she is his cub, she thinks, or his sister more properly and she pinches him back. He nuzzles, she presses a kiss to his cold wet nose which seems to settle the matter and she finally allows herself to drift to her usual dreams where she walks across the stars. She never knows where the stars are, if they are in the sky or in her eyes or painted in some smooth straight but she dances on them all the same, makes each bright point sing as she flashes just as much as they do.

There is chatter when she wakes, the smell of cooking and Sombra begging for scraps, being shushed as Mason talks and asks questions and answers those directed to him. Araceli rubs sleep grit from her eyes and joins in, watching Mason peel some root vegetable. He is clumsy, his eyes not like their eyes. His eyes have known sun. His eyes have known artificial lights. He is not used to stars and gloom or to the flint and glass knives they use in their tasks, glass that is so strong they can only use star fire to change its shape to fashion their jars or their tools but still he works. She wonders what is wrong with him, if he is in a deep denial and when he will break and fall apart as she joins in with the task, her work methodical as she gathers the skins for later use for bait or for the things they grow here.

"Your home is magical," Mason whispers as they eat and she shushes him. Eating is done in silence for the story telling happens after and if there is idle chatter they will never get to the stories and she is sure everyone will want to tell him something. Of the histories for so often they must wait until their audience has recovered themselves, has decided to join in but Mason has thrown himself in with gusto but there are those who say he is not alone once they have eaten, dishes gathered. They talk and talk and Araceli listens to tales she has heard a thousand thousand times before, slight alteration here and there for they do not write down their knowledge but speak it aloud so all might bear witness. Sombra rolls to his back and she scratches the soft pink of his belly and the thick fur, poking or flicking to make him jump, his tongue lolling out stupidly. They talk for so many hours that her legs grow numb and she slips away to work at her jewellery, pretty stones and wire, decorations for friends and for about her jar for special days when they remember the old ways as best they can.

Or how the elders tell it. There cannot be many who remember sun and sky now. Perhaps it is only the elders and the thought makes her feel nothing. This is home. She was birthed in darkness and surrounded by stars and when she dies she will die in darkness and her star jar will be opened to let the light fly out into the cavern where so many empty jars sit in stacks, stars above them, waiting to be claimed.

She should take Mason now he has seen the elders, slept and eaten.

"Mason," she calls, putting aside her work and Sombra is up but by his side and she thinks _traitor_ and his tail tucks between his legs, ears flat. Flat until Mason scratches behind them. She fastens the wolf's collar and picks up her light. "I have to give you a light of your own and I should show you what else there is here." Mason nods and bids his farewells and she leads him through a different passage, one seldom used even by her. He chatters of stories he has been told, of ancient figures from before they were exiled and of life here and he wants to see it all, he says, he wants to experience it, he is so glad to be here and she grinds her teeth. If truth be told, she likes the quiet. She likes to walk alone with her shadow where they do not need to share words to understand and to communicate but all the same she is a guide, appointed by the elders and so she will show him. "After," she says though, "you must be given your light."  
  
"Is it truly a star?"  
  
"It is."  
  
"The holy men never spoke about stars, they said sun and moon were all we needed."  
  
"The stars were ours, are ours, will forever be ours. We are children of the stars," she explains even if he has already heard it and will hear it so often because it is their truth. Children of the stars who came through the sky and never shall they see one again and so they brought the other down with them, so the elders say.

There is silence when he beholds the great cavern. She can understand because it is a sight indeed, all those thousands of jars who gleam beneath the swirling vortex of stars, pulsating as though alive and to them they are. She steps in, Sombra sits and waits, tail wagging because he knows too, he knows this is a place to be revered, Mason takes his time and he walks stiffly, elbows tucked tight as though afraid to disturb even the air of this place.

"The glass does not break," she explains. "Choose a jar and open it, the light will fly in and it will be yours until the day you die." The jars are all the same and are made frequently, small jars for children and pets and places large jars will not reach and he laughs in delight when he selects one and the light flies into it.  
  
"Can I touch it?" She nods and he does so before he closes the lid, wonder in his eyes. "I thought it would feel of something."  
  
"Light is light," she explains and lifts the strap over his neck. "Come."

Together they walk, stopping by other caverns where people have set tents, to the small fields of strange grasses and bushes and tiny trees that grow with fruit. She tells them the names as they walk, plucks moon cherries and tells him how they make night dagger wine with them, indicates the insects that pollinate them, like butterflies but paler, shimmering and glowing where the City Above butterflies do not. He is entranced. She shows them the animals they found when they explored, gentle things that they farm for milk and pelt and meat that they think were trapped by some cave-in that prevented them from going back to the world above but the tunnels wide enough with edible things that they might keep living, keep producing until there were those who would tend to them. He shies from their great spiders, some as big as her wolf.

"For silk – it's strong. Venom for medicine too." She explains that they do not attack but he still shakes his head and shies away from her and from them and asks to move on to somewhere nicer, somewhere that doesn't make his skin crawl.

So she brings him to the lake, cool and quiet. It's not a lake for fishing but there are tiny things. A pool for quiet reflection and for swimming and it's here that they talk about his city. She catches up on new things, things she hasn't heard yet because it's been a while since the last newcomer was at the door she is guide to but the conversation circles as the fish do in the pool they walk around until eventually talk turns to how long Araceli has been down here, if she wants to go back as the elders say all must surely do.

"I have never known sky," she answers truthfully for she has no reason to lie, "I do not know if I wish to. This is all I have ever known." She presses a bare foot to the stone to raise a thin cloud of dust, runs a palm flat over the cavern wall to gesture to the lake and the bioluminescent glow of it, the strange jellyfish like creatures pulsing along, their bells rippling, long stingers trailing. "This is my home."  
  
"And mine too now."  
  
She nods, sure she looks solemn like an old crone and hangs her jar about her neck from the thin leather cord, him doing the same. "There are likely ways to get out if you searched but you may die before you manage it and it may be that you have changed here."  
  
"Are you afraid to go above?"

His question is innocent but it gives her pause, has her stopping in what she is doing and Sombra shows what she does not – one moment hackles, the other plaintive whines. She has never been asked that before, not once. It galls her to realise that she is afraid, so very afraid of his City Above that it makes her breath catch in her throat.

"It's okay to be afraid," he says and then he is falling, the jar clinking and rattling, light bouncing across the floor. Sombra is atop him, heaving, snarling and snapping with his lips curled back to fully bare his teeth, saliva dripping down onto Mason's throat.  
  
"Sombra!" The wolf turns and stares her down. "Off boy. Off."  
  
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Mason's words are like a whisper of wind, more strained the longer the wolf sits atop him with his heavy paws until finally he steps off and to Araceli's side, bristling and grumbling so that she feels it where he is pressed tight to her leg.  
  
"I have never known anything but this. I don't know if I want to know anything but this. This is home, this is safe. I am not the elders."  
  
"I..." Mason sits up slowly, eyes on Sombra always, fingers outstretched for his jar until he pulls it close to his chest and rises. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to..."  
  
She shakes her head because her throat and her pride won't let her accept the apology but she is sure he knows that she means it and that she is not mortally offended. "Why are you not afraid here?"  
  
"Oh I'm afraid. My heart is beating like a rabbit in headlights or a under the nose of Sombra but it's better to life than to cry isn't it?"  
  
"I've never cried."  
  
"You've never cried?"  
  
"I've never had a reason." She sits and swings bare feet into cool water, something settling in her hair but the stings do not reach her as tiny silver flasher fish nibble at her toes, making brighter trails through the glowing water. "There are beasts here, there is water, there is air so there are ways in and ways out but we have never dug up, we have never built great spiralling stairs. We have built outward from the doors," she uses her left hand for a door and moves her right hand as far as she can, to the very limit of her arm span, "but we do not build up even if the elders talk. They are the only ones left to remember the sky. We mourned, we grieved but we have our stars and we are not as we were once." She holds her left arm against his, cold where he is warm, pale where he is pink. "We are not who we were."

It makes her sad. She is not used to feeling sad. Sombra whines and howls, it echoes off the walls. Mason squeezes her hand and smiles at her.

"I don't think any of us are, not up there, not down here."

They sit by the pool until her feet are so cold they are numb and they walk back leaving a trail of her glowing footprints behind.

He sleeps next to her in his own separate bed of fabrics dyed with crushed stones and shells and whatever else they have here to colour things down here. Sombra sleeps between them, on his back, on his side, on his belly, he dreams and yips and his legs jerk. Mason becomes not a shadow after that but he walks with her and chatters, always chatters like a bird and she names him Luscinia in jest. Altar of the Sky, Nightingale and Shadow and they all go together, traversing the dark halls and caverns, Mason more explorer than she is or ever will be and one day she supposes she will lose him to the sprawling maze of this underground city, where he will meet others as he walks and walks, ever exploring but right now he is hers somehow.

He becomes a storyteller and wears her beadwork and when she and Sombra go to guide more newcomers; he joins and tells them stories all along the way to ease their fears and to put their minds to rest before they meet the elders.

And one day, loping through the darkness he finds a she wolf, as white as Sombra is dark and he calls her Lux and she wears the same collar and jar as Sombra.

"With these, we will never be lost, we will never be alone, we will never be parted."

And she smiles, kisses him in the dark and closes the flap of their tent, the wolves guarding it, light suffusing out through thin fabric as dancing shadows are cast in the City Beneath Cities.


End file.
